61. Robert Peston

Business stories have come to dominate the news agenda and Robert Peston is right at the vanguard of it.

The BBC business editor has been hugely influential and was responsible for the scoop of the year with his story about the collapse of Northern Rock.

Robert Peston. Photograph: Graeme Robertson Graeme Robertson/Guardian
His idiosyncratic reporting style may not be to everyone's taste, but his impact in one of the BBC's most high-profile reporting roles is undeniable.

"He is not a great broadcaster, but he is a great business journalist," said one member of our panel.

Peston's Northern Rock story won scoop of the year at the Royal Television Society journalism awards, while Peston himself was recognised with a bronze award for news journalist of the year at the Sony Radio Academy Awards.

He joined the BBC in 2006 from the Sunday Telegraph, where he was City editor and then associate editor.

Previously he had spent nearly a decade at the Financial Times as financial editor, political editor and head of the investigations unit, when he won the What The Papers Say investigative journalist of the year award in 1994.

Another claim to fame during his time on the FT was bringing Will Lewis on board from the Mail on Sunday.

Peston began his career as a stockbroker before becoming a reporter for Investors Chronicle in the mid-80s. He joined the Sunday Telegraph in 2005 after two years as editorial director of Quest, a financial analysis dotcom.

The BBC's business editor post was created by then director general Greg Dyke in 2001 and Peston followed the original incumbent, Jeff Randall, in the post. It has since become one of the BBC's most important roles.

Like his BBC political counterpart Nick Robinson, Peston is a true multimedia presence, cropping up on radio, TV and online with his blog, rather uninspiringly titled Peston's Picks.

Peston also finds time to write books including Brown's Britain, about the rivalry between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and his latest, Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives, described by one critic as a "lucid and timely guide to the world of turbo-capitalism".

Peston's occasionally stuttering delivery is anything but turbo-charged. "I'm definitely loads better than I was," he told the Daily Telegraph in January. "I am not going to endeavour to become somebody hugely smooth and polished and completely phoney."

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